It is well known that Kramnik baselessly accuses everyone. The article seems to be more about statistics than chess, and doesn’t make any accusations. Kind of a click bait title IMO.
The title is “Did a US Chess Champion Cheat?” and the text of the article uses statistical analysis to show that the person most likely did not cheat. What would you consider to be misleading between the title and the article?
There's a YouTube video where he orders a match with someone and insists that they order brand new in box laptops and a locally hosted chess server (I think the hypothesis was testing if in person games were any different than online. The other player was in the same room). But they ran into technical difficulties when windows began auto-updates.
He's accused Luis Paulo Supi (Brazillian grandmaster) a few times after losing to him, and he accused Andrew Tang after losing to him. The latter was criticized in some online circles because it was seen as bullying a then 14 year old.
I don't know many other notable cases of Nakamura accusing players of cheating. Many players dislike how Nakamura conducts himself on stream and how he interacts with the chess community and this leads to exaggeration. It's simply wrong to compare him to Kramnik, who has dedicated many hours over the last couple years to accusing players.
Hikaru accused Luis Paulo Supi of cheating at least twice.
From his Wikipedia article:
```
In an online blitz tournament hosted by the Internet Chess Club in May 2015, American Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura accused Supi of cheating (Supi had defeated Nakamura).[2] The tournament judges accepted Nakamura's accusation, reverted the match's result, and banned Supi from the tournament. Brazilian Grandmaster Rafael Leitão wrote in his personal website, "Accusing him of using an engine in this match is absurd. The match is full of tactical mistakes. Nakamura played extremely poorly and, honestly, wouldn't have survived long against any engine given his terrible opening.".
```
Some years later Nakamura lost 4-0 and again insinuated that GM Supi used an engine.
Despite all that, Nakamura still published a video calling him a "legend" for once beating Magnus in 18 moves
I'm just trying to figure out how you even cheat on chess, the only thing that comes to mind is moving pieces, and sneaking new ones on the board, but if there's enough cameras, how do you get away with it, eventually someone WILL notice, highlight it, point it out, and you will be shamed.
Just having someone who is following the game with a chess engine and who has a way to get a single message to you telling you that your opponent's last move was a serious blunder would be enough to give you a noticeable advantage.
For example look at the position in this video [1] from a recent game on Chess.com between Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana (the title of the video says Magnus vs Hikaru because the video covers 3 of Hikaru's games in the tournament).
I linked to a spot in the video a little before the part where one simple message could changed the game because the host is explaining what Hikaru is going to be trying to do. Briefly, trading pieces off is good for Hikaru, and that's what he starts to do.
You can see from the evaluation bar this Stockfish says he is slightly better.
Then he plays Bg5 which looks like an easy way for force a pair of bishops off, continuing the plan. But look at the evaluation bar! It quickly swings from 0.2 in favor of white to 1.7 in favor of black. But black can only realize that advantage by playing RxN, a move that Fabiano did not even consider. He went on to lose the game.
A prearranged signal from a confederate that meant "Hikaru just made a game changing blunder" would very likely have resulted in Fabiano seeing RxN. It's a move that many would spot if they were given the position as a puzzle and so knew there was a tactic somewhere.
> I'm just trying to figure out how you even cheat on chess,
You use a chess engine to tell you the best move - you can run a chess engine on a modern phone that will easily best the world's top human chess players.
The simplest forms of this are things like: "play online, chess engine open in another window", "use your phone hiding in a bathroom cubicle" and "member of the audience follows your game with a chess engine and signals you somehow"
There are also rumoured to be very subtle ways of doing this - like playing unassisted for most of the game, but an engine providing 'flashes of genius' at one or two crucial moves of the game.
Major competitions have things like metal detectors and time-delay video feeds hoping to make cheating harder.
Since even a phone has enough processing power to make Stockfish play better than a super-GM, the Faraday cage isn't enough to prevent, say, someone tapping the position into a computer on their person and feeling for some sort of vibration[1] in response. It takes very little information to represent a position, and commentators have pointed out that the minimum amount of information required to produce a decisive advantage is 1 bit ("A winning move exists").
This makes me want to cheat just as a technical challenge. Could I hide a computer in my hair? Could I ingest a capsule computer and communicate with it using the resonance of my teeth chattering? (No, I would not insert one in an inappropriate place).
I'm sure it would be a downer that I cheated but it would do them a favor by saying: "look, you cannot stop it. Time for something new".
There is a Java script plugin for lichess that verbally tells you the best move in each position. I installed it (only for eval) and won my game (so unfair! But it was a random and not rated game). I removed the script. So it would be easy to use this or something like this to announce game changing situations.
"... But had I started cheating in a clever manner, I am convinced no one would notice. I would've just needed to cheat one or two times during the match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which was way better. Or, here there is a possibility of winning and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invicible."
Getting any kind of information from a chess engine would be sufficient to gain an edge for a good player. Even something as simple as a nudge that there is a high value move in a position with no information about what the actual move is could be enough. Big chess tournaments tightly control phones and other devices for this reason. That's on a single-match level. On a tournament level there have been allegations of collusion where players will intentionally arrange their own matches to either be quick draws (to get a break to focus on other matches) or to give points to a designated player to help them win the tourney, Fischer famously accused Soviet chess players of doing this.
In the old Soviet/US rivalry days there was an accusation of cheating that I thought was novel. The accusation was that the Soviet players in the middle rounds were doing subtle not-right moves with the US #1. This forced the lead US player to put way too much effort into figuring out if it was some new line that he didn't know about and tiring him out. Then by the time he got to the final he was exhausted and confused.
No? It's a technique that could readily be done by one person, and teams are allowed to strategize. Bluffing/deception is kosher in chess, just harder as the key elements of the game are all public.
> During adjournments, players could count on the help of other strong masters, called seconds. These seconds would analyze the position and tell the player what they should play when the game resumed.
In parallel to this (and Bobby Fischer explicitly accused them of this), the Soviet players had already decided who would be the champion amongst themselves, and subtly let that player win his matches so that he was fresh and well-rested when he ended up playing non-Soviet players.
The vast, overwhelming majority of chess games are not played in front of cameras or even in-person. The accusation in the article was about online play, and specifically blitz which is played online even more commonly than slower formats of chess because moving quickly is easier for many people with a mouse than a physical board.
The way people cheat online is by running a chess engine that analyzes the state of the board in their web browser/app and suggests moves and/or gives a +/- rating reflecting the balance of the game. Sometimes people run it on another device like their phone to evade detection, but the low-effort ways are a browser extension or background app that monitors the screen. The major online chess platforms are constantly/daily banning significant amounts of people trying to cheat in this way.
Chess.com and Lichess catch these cheaters using a variety of methods, some of which are kept secret to make it harder for cheaters to circumvent them. One obvious way is to automatically compare people's moves to the top few engine moves and look for correlations, which is quite effective for, say, catching people who are low-rated but pull out the engine to help them win games occasionally. It's not that good for top-level chess because a Magnus or Hikaru or basically anyone in the top few hundred players can bang out a series of extremely accurate moves in a critical spot - that's why they're top chess players, they're extremely good. Engine analysis can still catch high-level cheaters, but it often takes manual effort to isolate moves that even a world-champion-class human would not have come up with, and offers grounds for suspicion and further investigation rather than certainty.
For titled events and tournaments, Chess.com has what's effectively a custom browser (Proctor) that surveils players during their games, capturing their screen and recording the mics and cameras that Chess.com requires high-level players to make available to show their environment while they play. This is obviously extremely onerous for players, but there's often money on the line and players do not want to play against cheaters either so they largely put up with the inconvenience and privacy loss.
Despite all of the above, high-level online cheating still happens and some of it is likely not caught.
> It's not that good for top-level chess because a Magnus or Hikaru or basically anyone in the top few hundred players can bang out a series of extremely accurate moves in a critical spot - that's why they're top chess players, they're extremely good.
Interesting; I thought I'd read that even the very best players only average ~90% accuracy, whereas the best engines average 99.something%?
Top-level players regularly are in the 90-95% range aggregated over many games, with spikes up to 98-99%. If you have 98 or 99% accuracy over the course of an entire game (which happens sometimes!), it's either very short or you had significant sequences where you were 100% accurate. If that happened in one of my games it'd be clear evidence I was cheating, if it happens in a Magnus game it's him correctly calculating a complex line and executing it, which he does pretty often.
Edit: Even lower-level cheated games are rarely 100% accurate for the whole game, cheaters usually mix in some bad or natural moves knowing that the engine will let them win anyways. That's why analysis is usually on critical sections, if someone normally plays with a 900 rating but spikes to 100% accuracy every time there's a critical move where other options lose, that's a strong suggestion they're cheating. One of the skills of a strong GM is sniffing out situations like that and being able to calculate a line of 'only moves' under pressure, so it's not nearly as surprising when they pull it off.
To compute accuracy, you compare the moves which are made during the game with the best moves suggested by the engine. So, the engine will evaluate itself 100%, given its settings are the same during game and during evaluation.
You get 99.9something% when you evaluate one strong engine by using another strong engine (they're mostly aligned, but may disagree in small details), or when the engine configuration during the evaluation is different from the configuration used in a game (e.g. engine is given more time to think).
Accuracy is a poor measure for cheating since better chess players will put you in a more complicated position. I'm not especially good but I've played some games with high accuracy just because I just did some book moves and the opponent makes a mistake. Accuracy was high but the correct moves were never especially hard to see.
reading your description of the "invasiveness" of chess.com's surveillance of high level tournament play, I realized that chess.com could issue their own anal probe, a sonar listening device to check that there aren't any other anal probes in use. finally! we can be assured of a good clean game played fairly from both seats!
Getting tips from another person or a computer on what best move to make. This could be as simple as a compatriot in the audience giving you hand signals.
Would you mind elaborating on this? I don’t understand the point. Maybe naively, I would think that evidence of life on mars would increase the probability of life on exoplanets.
If the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that there's a great filter that prevents many advanced civilizations from sticking around long enough to be observable, then we hope that the filter is behind us rather than in front of us.
The more common that life is, the more likely it is in front of us.
I don't even understand why people call it a paradox. A paradox has no obvious solution. This one has many obvious solutions, the most obvious one that the premise is faulty: perhaps life is not common at all.
There is another premise that is faulty: that the answer to "where's everybody" is that "since we see nobody, there is nobody". But for all we know the planets around Alpha Centauri may be teaming with life, and there would be no way for us to detect that. If only 1% of the solar systems in our galaxy host intelligent life, then the number of intelligent life forms would be truly mind-boggling, yet we wouldn't be able to detect a whisper of their presence. For the simple reason that space is also mind-blowingly vast, and all signals decay with the square root of the distance.
That's part of the Great Filter answer to the Fermi paradox. Though, I agree, it's not really a paradox. If the great filter is true, the first filter is life forming at all. We hope that the filter is behind us and that's why intelligent life in the universe seems rare, rather than ahead of us. If life is common, but intelligent life is uncommon, that's concerning because it makes it more likely that the filter is ahead of us. Meaning, something like, once an organism has control over the whole planet there's something that prevents them from going to multiple planets.
I mean, we don't have any other perspective to look through. There is no other point of reference to draw from. We try to compensate by assuming that our system, planet, and species aren't particularly special and are probably about average in terms of supporting life.
We can't know or even begin to guess at what an alien civilization may do or think or how they evolved. Best we can do is assume it's probably somewhat similar to our experience. At least it's based on something factual. Anything else is really just wild speculation.
We pretty much have to assume aliens will be sort of similar to us because we haven't met any. Our experience is the only one we've got, so it's the most reasonable baseline we have. We know that aliens will probably be wildly different from us, but it's so unknowable as to be moot. Do we base our assumptions on Heinlein's writing? Asimov? Douglas Adams? Anything other than what we know from our own experience is just fanciful fiction.
But also you're not supposed to take as read the Fermi paradox, Kardashev scale, or any other ways of thinking about aliens. It's implied that they won't be anything like us. You're not supposed to take it as a literal statement that alien species will be hairless bipeds with a warlike society who think and look like us. You're supposed to follow the assumptions that statistically, we're probably not special as a species and probably any aliens we meet will have evolved along similar lines and probably will be relatable to us. Implicitly we understand that this likely is not true. We just don't know and there aren't really any options that are more reasonable or reliable than basing assumptions on the one and only planet we know that has intelligent life.
This is too pessimistic. We can absolutely "begin to guess" at what an alien civilization might look like or how they might have evolved. Reasonable possibilities are very heavily constrained by information theory, the laws of thermodynamics, the very finite number of elements that make up the universe, chemistry, particle physics, etc. You can appeal to fantasy by dreaming up multi-dimensional energy beings, and of course such things have some tiny but nonzero probability of existing. But you can do the same thing regarding what we might find if we look at some random pond water under a microscope. Maybe we'll find crazy silicon-based life forms, or some phylum we never knew existed, or a microscopic Tyrannosaurus Rex! Maybe. But it's perfectly reasonable to ascribe an extremely small probability to such things based on everything we already know about the universe, and it's reasonable for the same reason to ascribe a very small probability to the existence multi-dimensional energy beings that would completely defy our understanding. For any given alien life form we might find, there's a very high probability (I give it at least 90%) that it would be based on chemical pathways that would make us go "oh, neat", but not go "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!"
I'm a complete layman, but I wonder if chemistry on Earth (and rest of our solar system) is also influenced somewhat by the particular properties of our star, its and our magnetospheres etc. and the gas clouds our planets coalesced from.
As in, different stars may encourage slightly different chemical reactions and interactions on their planets.
Like, for example, could it be possible for a planet to form with a naturally highly magnetized mineral in its crust? Would it affect the rest of the chemistry on the planet? Would it cause the ground to interact with its star's magnetic envelope, like our atmosphere within the Auroras does?
Putin and Xi fantasizing about immortality via 3D-printed organs quite starkly illustrated that many adults do not understand the difference between science and science fiction.
The elephant in the room here is that advanced intelligent life as we understand it is some inevitable step in evolution. A random walk of mutations on top of mutations lead us to this and only because the environmental context favored adaptions toward intelligence in the case of our species at the time. This is probably why most sci fi is not written by evolutionary biologists.
Yes, but as time goes to infinity there will eventually be an environment context and mutation path that will result in something that has a similar level of intelligence.
In fact, this makes the preoccupation with humans escaping a Great Filter all the more childish. Even on a single planet the species that will evolve from humans by the time Earth is swallowed by the sun will have less in common with humans than we do now with single cell organisms. Internalize that fact a little bit. Once you realize it is absurd to talk about the human species being preserved as is to the end of time, you will understand the silliness of this obsession. Cause after that point you might as well believe in a deity.
If it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, it suffices to hope that only single cell organisms survive the Great Filter, since given enough time it might lead to something that is as intelligent or more intelligent and kind than humans.
Embrace the silliness. The answer to "Why should we humans spread to other planets?" need only be "Why the fuck not?"
That is, unless you want to fund your rocket company. In which case you have to make people believe in a deity.
Er... No that's not a meaningful critique. There's no framework that doesn't assume it's a random process. The point is to find out how likely each step is to occur, randomly.
Even the Kardashev scale is based on the assumption that unfettered economic activity as humans conceived of it in the mid 20th century would be a common enough phenomenon to classify, including shoehorning in our wildest science fiction ideas. Only the most unscrupulous of our species probably want to maximize production of widgets beyond the limits of this planet to the point where a Dyson sphere must be built. Would a Buddhist monk have any interest in that for example, or are their metrics of “productivity” more metaphysical perhaps? Or someone considering preserving a system and not exceeding what it is capable of sustainably offering? How about a blue whale, do they have an increasing energy demand per capita as well?
We’re working off the assumption that life is rare in the universe (and thus a great filter). That is why the stars aren’t covered in life.
If this isn’t true, and life is actually common throughout the galaxy ... then the great filter might still be ahead of us — such as not surviving technological adolescence. Meaning we’re not special, we just haven’t died off yet.
Great filters start with the observation that we have detected no signs of alien technological civilization. The assumption is this means they’re rare.
That doesn’t mean much. If it is actually common and the great filter is passing technological adolescence, then at least one civilisation would need to be around at least a hundred thousand years ago to be detected by us. Then, they would need to survive the great filter. We’ve only been broadcasting for 80 years or so, and any modern technology is probably indistinguishable from noise...
In other words, even if the average technological civilisation lasts 1000 years, the odds of those civilisations overlapping are nearly zero if the great filter is ahead of us. Unless civilisations manage to last much, much longer than 1,000 years (millions of years), the chance that two blips overlap in time and space closely enough to detect each other is basically negligible.
That is why the “life on Mars” point feels ominous:
- If abiogenesis is easy, the filter isn’t there.
- If the filter is later (like surviving technological adolescence), then most civilisations blink out quickly.
Which means overlapping, detectable civilisations would be vanishingly rare, explaining the silence, but also suggesting our future may be short.
Life is pretty robust, civilization is not.
I'd say it's pretty intuitive that the filter is ahead of us - civilizations collapsing has happened multiple times already in the last few millennia. Earth becoming sterile has never happened as far as we know.
Yes, but a civilization collapsing doesn’t kill off an entire species nor (usually) wipe out knowledge completely. Thus it wouldn’t be a great filter. However, perhaps it is pretty common to create a grey goo, or nuke yourself, or whatever. That would be a life ending event.
It's still about what we are able to observe.
If there is a bronze age civilization in the vicinity of betelgeuse, how would we tell?
You'd need a civilization advanced enough to do radio communication - and that has a lot of fragile interdependencies.
Not really. The great filter idea is only one of many proposed solutions to the Fermi paradox. The Dark Forest hypothesis would have the universe filled with life, which is all in deep hiding from an intergalactic civilization hellbent on destroying all other life.
Personally I think the great filter is a dumb idea for precisely the reason you posit. The universe is (probably) infinite, which means there's an infinite probability that we aren't special or alone. Maybe we're the first; the universe is (relatively) pretty young from what we can tell. I doubt that too, but I think it's one of the most plausible explanations.
But really what it comes down to is that in an infinite universe, the probability of anything happening exaxtlt once is infinitely small. It is infinitely more probable that there is or will be other life out there.
Really, out of uncountable trillions of planets in trillions of galaxies across tens of billions of years, how could it be that exactly one planet can produce life? I think it's egotistical navel-gazing in the extreme to assume we're alone.
If you take the beginning of the cosmos to be 1 second ago, the point where other galaxies will be unobservable is in just a few seconds (at T+7–8). We’ve only had civilization for about 700-800 nanoseconds. You could fit hundreds or even thousands of advanced civilizations in there and they’d never know the other existed.
I think the building blocks of life are so common in the universe it might be a case of "easy come, easy go". It wouldn't be surprising if simple life happened anywhere it was given half a chance at all, but one would equally expect that it would die out just as quickly when conditions changed (which they certainly did on Mars).
And of course nothing is ruling out life in the nooks and crannies of Mars.
Presumably the planet became much less geologically active, causing Mars to lose it's magnetic field and thus it's atmosphere, and that caused a mass extinction. If there was life on the surface in the past, I imagine it still exists deep underground or in lava tubes or such.
That actually isn't a hard question to answer. Mars lacks an active core or a magnetosphere, so the atmosphere blew away, freezing the surface and removing almost all of the liquid water.
We have proven that Mars used to have a magnetic field like Earth that protected it from solar radiation. We also know that it does not presently have a magnetic field. At some point in the distant past, Mars's core cooled and solidified, which removes the magnetic field.
The big problem is that the solar wind strips away the atmosphere and water, but that's (probably) not what killed all Martian life. As the magnetic field decreases, more and more harmful radiation reaches the surface. The planet was probably sterilized by radiation long before the atmosphere was lost and the oceans evaporated.
We're pretty sure this is what happened. We've been studying Mars's geology for a long time and we can see evidence for most of this process.
For the sphere inside cube you can draw these out and get some intuitions about how the ratio of empty space changes.
One thing you can think out is how if you pick two random vectors in a high dimension they are almost certainly orthogonal. In 2D, pick a random vector. There will only be 2 vectors orthogonal to it, right? Now do the same in 3D. There's a whole plane orthogonal to your vector! That's a hell of a lot more than 2! Move up into 4D and you have a 3D-hyperplane that's orthogonal.
The spikes on the hypercube might have some visual intuition. In 2D you have 4 corners and you can imagine the smooth rounding off into a circle. 3D we now have 8 corners and the sphere again looks rounded off but you can see here how the hypercube gets spikey but whatever you think the hypersphere looks like you're likely wrong. Even the cube's intuition still fails you with this thinking so you need to be careful
I am curious, what are your complaints about the new SE? I have a 2016 SE and am going to upgrade to either the 2020 SE, 12 mini, or 12. The 2016 SE feels a bit small in my hand (I have large hands), but I worry the iPhone 12 regular size will be too large.
Garner's Modern English Usage is the final word on grammar, as far as I'm concerned. Other dictionaries are pathetic postmodern excuses for language guides.
I think dsugarman meant "at least once over any FINITE amount of time", in which case each prisoner might visit again an infinite number of times, but it can be arbitrarily many turns in the future.
So, if you wait a finite amount of time (in this case a "few" billion years") it's possible that the visiting condition might not yet be satisfied.
